Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  As the April 13 session continued, with the Beatles’ general rehearsal for the song having concluded after more than six hours, George called the proceedings to order. The bandmates attempted a first take for “Paperback Writer,” with McCartney and Harrison playing their Epiphone Casino hollow-bodied guitars, Starr on drums, and Lennon playing the tambourine. During the breaks, Ringo can be heard tapping his sticks together to keep the beat. After the first take, which broke down after slightly less than a minute, Harrison complained that the others were speeding up, with McCartney registering his agreement. Moments later, take two ensued, and the Beatles executed a flawless rhythm track. At this juncture, given the length of the session, George and the band opted to pack it in for the day, with plans for plenty of overdubs in the offing at the next session. In addition to the debut of an exciting new Beatles track, April 13 also marked George and the group’s inaugural session with tape operator Richard Lush, who had previously been serving as an apprentice at EMI Studios. As Lush later recalled, “I was pretty nervous. I’d worked with Cliff and the Shadows, and they were very easy going but I knew that Beatles sessions were private. One was rarely allowed to open the door and peek in, and I heard that they took a while to accept new people. It certainly took a while before they knew me as Richard. Until then it was ‘who is that boy sitting in the corner hearing all of our music?’ But everything worked out in the end.” But not before he experienced a run-in with Beatle Paul, who accosted him with a dose of Liverpudlian humor. After introducing himself—“Erm, my name is Richard. I’m a button-pusher here”—he found himself face-to-face with McCartney, who replied, “Oh, yeah? Wanna fight?” For a moment, Lush stood uncertainly in the middle of the control room before he figured out that he had become the latest victim of one of the bandmates’ famous studio pranks.6

  On the afternoon of Thursday, April 14, George and the bandmates were back in Studio 3. With a basic rhythm track in hand for “Paperback Writer,” they spent the next several hours experimenting with various overdubs in order to enhance McCartney’s latest composition. As if the potential for innovation had become limitless by this point, McCartney suggested that Martin try playing a jangle-box or tack piano to accompany the evolving rhythm track associated with “Paperback Writer.” At EMI Studios, the jangle-box piano was a Steinway upright piano that had been modified to create a percussive sound. This was accomplished when studio personnel brushed the piano’s hammers with cellulose and retuned some of its strings in order to create the distinctive jangling effect. As with “Mark I,” Emerick diverted the signal through the Leslie speaker system in order to enhance the effect of the jangle piano, although it was ultimately deleted from the final mix, as was Martin’s Vox Continental organ part for “Paperback Writer.” With various bits of experimentation having finally concluded, they began assembling the various component parts of “Paperback Writer” into a seamless whole. Having relegated the previous day’s rhythm track to track one, Martin overdubbed McCartney’s lead vocal on track three, with Lennon and Harrison’s cascading backing vocals on track four. Track two was reserved for performing the various supplemental effects that they had been preparing, including McCartney’s bass part and the aforementioned keyboard experiments from Martin himself. While Martin’s jangle-box piano and organ parts were discarded, Lennon and Harrison adorned “Paperback Writer” with one final playful bit of fun, singing “Frère Jacques” at McCartney’s instigation between the phrases of his lead vocals. Martin later confessed that he hadn’t noticed the French nursery rhyme when it was originally recorded. “You can’t really hear the words,” he later explained, “because they are so soft. I must confess, I didn’t spot this little diversion on the number, but George [Harrison] reassured me that it was just one of those weird things that happened for the sake of it. There was no connection whatever between the famous Brother Jack and the knack of writing paperbacks.”7

  Although the Beatles’ next single had been slated for a May 30 release date in the United Kingdom, George and his production team didn’t waste any time carrying out the mixing process for “Paperback Writer,” for which they prepared mono masters during a 7:30 PM session. Working in the Studio 3 control room, George, Geoff, and Phil made two passes at creating the mix, for which Phil had assembled copious notes throughout the recording process. According to Phil’s notes, track one’s a cappella interludes were intentionally faded out in order to obscure Ringo’s drumstick taps during the breaks. The harmony backing vocals were also treated with tape echo prior to each chorus, which was then slowed down in order to enhance the effect. The mixing session for “Paperback Writer” was pioneering in its complexity, clearly acting as a harbinger for things to come in George and the Beatles’ universe. But in terms of the highly structured professional world of Abbey Road, postrecording edits such as the ones performed on behalf of “Paperback Writer” were discouraged. As Emerick later observed, “In the archaic EMI way of thinking, edits were frowned upon. Management didn’t want anyone taking a razor to master tapes, so multitrack editing—which would allow us to join the start of one take onto the end of another—was rarely allowed in those days. Even during mixing, editing was discouraged, although it would have allowed us to create a mix in sections—something that was commonly done in most other recording studios. Somehow EMI just didn’t care what was going on in the outside world: we’d have to get the mix right from start to finish. If we messed up the middle, or even if the very end of the fadeout wasn’t quite right, we would have to start all over again; we couldn’t just edit in a replacement for the bad bit. As a result, you got that adrenaline going, and the mixes themselves became performances.”8

  As Martin later pointed out, “Paperback Writer” proved to be yet another watershed moment given that it was “the first time that we have echo on a Beatles track.” For “Paperback Writer,” the mixing phase was especially crucial in order to ensure that the echo effect was created to Martin and the Beatles’ specifications. According to Emerick, the “fluttering echo at the end of each chorus added at the mix stage” was “accomplished by routing the vocals into a separate two-track machine and then connecting that machine’s output to its input. At the end of each chorus, Phil had the job of slowly increasing the record level until it just reached the point of feedback. If he went one notch too far, the echo would get out of control, so there were many attempts at doing the mix. Every time he’d go past that point, or not far enough, we’d have to stop and remix the entire song again.” But the process didn’t end with George’s mixing session that evening. The real test for the revolutionary new track occurred during the disc-cutting phase, when George and Geoff knew that the high bass content in “Paperback Writer” would come under company scrutiny. By this point, Ken Townsend had already been reprimanded by EMI’s chief technical engineer, Bill Livy, for incorrectly matching impedances in order to facilitate the loudspeaker-as-microphone scenario. Record companies were apprehensive about bass-heavy productions, fearing that styli might jump out of the grooves from too much low-end sound. When it came to “Paperback Writer,” Tony Clark was assigned the task of cutting the master lacquer for the recording. As Clark later recalled, “Paperback Writer” was “EMI’s first high-level cut, and I used a wonderful new machine just invented by the backroom boys, ATOC—Automatic Transient Overload Control. It was a huge box with flashing lights and what looked like the eye of a Cyclops staring out at you. But it did the trick. I did two cuts, one with ATOC and one without, played them to George Martin and he approved of the high-level one.”9

  For George and the Beatles, contending with EMI’s recalcitrance had become par for the course in recent years—and particularly as they began to engage in more innovations and experiments in the studio. “EMI had very firm rules,” Paul later remarked, “which we always had to break. It wasn’t a willful arrogance, it was just that we felt we knew better. . . . We were always forcing them into things they didn’t want to do.” “Paperback Writer” was s
imply the latest in a long line of production examples in which George and the Beatles challenged existing studio norms. “We were always pushing ahead,” said Paul, “‘louder, further, longer, more, different.’ I always wanted things to be different because we knew that people, generally, always want to move on, and if we hadn’t pushed them, the guys would have stuck by the rulebooks and still been wearing ties. Anyway, you’d then find ‘Oh, it worked!’ and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who’d put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of all those things.”10

  As it turned out, there was no rest for the weary when it came to George and the bandmates. As with “Paperback Writer,” “Rain” promised to continue George and the group’s ongoing efforts to expand the capabilities of the recording studio. As John’s entry in the sweepstakes to land the A-side of the next singles release, “Rain” had already been slated for the B-side of “Paperback Writer” by the time that it saw its Abbey Road debut during the evening session of Thursday, April 14. Like “Mark I,” “Rain” found its origins in Lennon’s recent forays into The Psychedelic Experience, particularly Leary’s philosophy of being: “Whether you experience heaven or hell,” Leary instructed his reader, “remember that it is your mind which creates them. Avoid grasping the one or fleeing the other. Avoid imposing the ego game on the experience.” For John, “Rain” afforded him with the opportunity to espouse his personal belief in the inherent value of pure human experience. With the tape rolling, Martin led the bandmates in a rehearsal of Lennon’s latest composition. As they prepared a basic track, McCartney continued the heavy bass sound that Emerick had facilitated with “Paperback Writer.” Nevertheless, as the band pushed forward, they couldn’t settle on a groove. The song seemed lifeless to them, as if it were missing an essential element. And that’s when Martin hit upon the idea of manipulating the recording’s tape speed in order to imbue the song with an unusual sonic palette. To accomplish the effect, he instructed Emerick to record the band’s performance on a sped-up tape machine. They managed to capture this sound across five takes, with Harrison and Lennon’s guitars and Starr’s drums on track one and McCartney’s bass on track two. At this point, the song’s basic rhythm track took on a languid, more lethargic mien. With this effect in place, Martin recorded Lennon’s lead vocal on track three. But even still, the process was far from complete. During postproduction, Lennon’s voice would be slowed down perceptibly, which would ultimately result in his lead vocal seeming slightly fast on the master recording. In this way, Martin’s recording of “Rain” reveals a unique arrangement, with different elements of the finished track being drawn from performances that had been captured at varying tape speeds.11

  But as with so many of the Beatles’ latest compositions, there were more surprises in store. With “Rain,” the surprises began with Lennon back home at Kenwood and ended with Martin in the Abbey Road control room. After George and the Beatles concluded the “Rain” session in the wee hours of April 15, Phil McDonald prepared a reel-to-reel tape copy of the unfinished song for John to take home. When he returned to Kenwood, the Beatle—being stoned at the time after the long, chauffeur-driven ride back home from the city—mistakenly thread the tape backward into his home machine. But as he listened to the playback in his narcotized state, he was confronted with the unexpected sound of hearing his voice blaring back at him in gibberish as the tape unspooled in reverse. In Lennon’s version, which he recounted several times over the ensuing years, he adored the effect upon that very first experience. Yet according to Harrison, Lennon’s account wasn’t entirely accurate. When the Beatles left the studio that night, each of the bandmates were given a reference tape to take home with them. Only Phil hadn’t properly rewound the tapes before handing them over to the departing Beatles. This fact had slipped Lennon’s mind by the time he returned to Kenwood. “I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana,” Lennon later recalled. At this point, Harrison’s account jibes with Lennon’s, as Lennon apparently experienced an epiphany about adopting such an effect during the next session, where Martin and the group were scheduled to continue working on “Rain.” What happened next, at least in Lennon’s version, was that “I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know. . . . Listen to this!’”12

  Yet according to Martin, neither Lennon’s account, which was later echoed by Emerick, nor Harrison’s was true. Rather, the idea of intentionally manipulating recordings by playing them backward had been in Martin’s bag of production tricks for many years. Back in 1962, he had even collaborated with the BBC’s Radiophonics Workshop laboratories in the creation of a moderately successful single titled “Time Beat” and credited to Ray Cathode, Martin’s pseudonym for the project. In the producer’s account of the “Rain” tape-manipulation episode, it was Martin himself who suggested that they experiment with backward recording. In a similar vein to the episode back in October 1965 in which he had waited for an opportune moment to deploy his windup piano effect on John’s “In My Life,” George took advantage of a session break to tinker with John’s latest creation. “I was always playing around with tapes, and I thought it might be fun to do something extra with John’s voice. So I lifted a bit of his main vocal off the four-track, put it onto another spool, turned it around and then slid it back and forth until it fitted. John was out at the time but when he came back he was amazed. Again, it was backwards forever after that.” The tape segment in question featured John’s lead vocal track in which he sang the song’s opening line, along with the phrase “sun shines rain,” which George had lifted from the second verse and the chorus. With the tape reel in hand, George overdubbed the thirty-second segment onto the tail end of the song.13

  Martin’s words about the Beatles’ growing penchant for experimentation—“it was backwards forever after that”—would prove to be very prescient indeed. Harrison, for one, was ecstatic over the possibilities that backward recording entailed. With “Rain,” “George Martin turned the master upside down and played it back. We were excited to hear what it sounded like, and it was magic—the backwards guitarist! The way the note sounded, because of the attack and the decay, was brilliant. We got very excited and started doing that on overdub. And then there was a bit of backwards singing as well, which came out sounding like Indian singing.” As Geoff later reported, tape manipulation very quickly became the norm for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. When they finished a new song, one of the Beatles inevitably said, “‘Okay, that sounds great, now let’s play it backwards or speeded up or slowed down.’ They tried everything backwards,” Geoff remembered, “just to see what things sounded like.” Disc cutter Tony Clark was hardly surprised by the bandmates’ newfound adoration for backward recordings. “It’s because of the enveloping of sound,” he later recalled. “It draws you in. It’s like someone putting their arms around you.” During the next session, a protracted, eleven-hour affair that was held in Studio 2 on Saturday, April 16, Martin and the Beatles created further refinements to “Rain,” including the addition of ADT to Lennon’s vocal as recorded during take five. This resulted in an audible slowing down of his voice, as noted previously. According to Geoff, “An offshoot of ADT was that we had a big audio oscillator to alter the frequency of the tape machines. We would drive it through a power amp and the power amp would drive the capstan wheel and enable you to speed up or slow down the machine at will. John—or George if it was his song—used to sit in the control room on mixes and actually play the oscillator.” In addition to the tape manipulation of John’s voice, the day’s session witnessed the superimposition of tambourine and backing vocals. And with that, the “Paperback Writer” backed with “Rain” single was complete. But after “Rain,” the die had truly been cast: from henceforward, George and Geoff observed the Beatles clamoring for more and greater sonic effects, affording the producer and his gifted engineer with one new challenge after another.14

  Geor
ge and the Beatles recorded yet another new track, “Doctor Robert,” during a Sunday, April 17, session in Studio 2. The latest composition from Lennon, “Doctor Robert” told the loosely fictionalized story of a Robert Freymann, a New York City physician who prescribed hallucinogens for his celebrity clientele. During the long session, Martin and the bandmates captured a basic rhythm track for the song over seven takes, with Lennon on rhythm guitar, McCartney on bass, Starr on drums, and Harrison shaking the maracas. Once the basic track had been completed, Harrison overdubbed a lead guitar part on his Epiphone Casino, Lennon added a harmonium, and McCartney tickled the ivories. Paul’s piano part was likely deleted during the next session, which was held on Tuesday, April 19, when John recorded his lead vocal, which described how Dr. Robert’s mysterious concoctions from his “special cup” will help you become “a new and better man” with a heightened capacity “to understand.” John’s vocal would subsequently be treated with ADT, which was swiftly becoming the knee-jerk recording technique of choice as George and the Beatles continued work on their new long-player.15

  By this point, the new Lennon compositions were coming fast and furious. On Wednesday, April 20, he debuted “And Your Bird Can Sing” for George and the Beatles’ consideration. The sessions for the band’s new LP had been marked by bouts of innovation and experimentation so far. But on this particular day, the group seemed uncharacteristically derivative, at one point breaking down into a rash of giggles and histrionics as they tried to find their groove with John’s latest song. Working a twelve-hour session in Studio 2, Martin observed as the Beatles attempted two takes of “And Your Bird Can Sing.” The basic rhythm track consisted of Lennon and Harrison’s electric guitars and Starr on drums. Track two was composed of Lennon’s lead vocals, McCartney’s bass, and a tambourine, likely shaken by Ringo. At this point, “And Your Bird Can Sing” sounded uncannily like a recording by the Byrds, the Roger McGuinn–fronted American band with a distinctive, chiming twelve-string Rickenbacker ambience. As the session wore on, Martin and the bandmates compiled a third track, with Lennon singing a second lead vocal while McCartney and Harrison sang harmonies. “And Your Bird Can Sing” was subjected to numerous overdubs, including one particular attempt that featured John and Paul devolving into nearly uncontrollable laughter, along with a coda filled with whistling before the song finally came to an end. Although “And Your Bird Can Sing” would see five remixes that day, it would be completely remade at a later date in a far more original—and serious—form.